We’re still not quite there yet, but today a new Australian government led by Malcolm Turnbull was sworn in by the Governor-General. After that, it will be time to get on with running the country.
The PM has certainly fallen from grace since replacing Tony Abbott in September last year, starting out being almost as popular as Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd were at the peaks of their careers, but then coming uncomfortably close to losing to Bill Shorten’s Labor opposition.
Turnbull’s Coalition needs at least 77 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives to hold government, and at this stage appears to have won only that number.
Shorten and his team are brimming with confidence after having brought Turnbull to the brink of defeat. And just as Tony Abbott did everything in his power to bring down Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Shorten will do the same this time with PM Turnbull.
So what can the PM do to turn things around?
Even with all the talk about Labor’s scare campaign on Medicare, the Turnbull Government nearly lost the election due to two reasons – voters either didn’t trust the Coalition or they didn’t think it was up to the job.
That means there’s three things Turnbull and his team have to do now.
Prove they are the better economic managers
Voters tend to think that Liberal governments, such as that of John Howard, are more responsible when it comes to managing the economy. We tend to forget that Howard governed during the mining boom and had buckets of taxes from those companies to spend on middle income earners with baby bonuses and first home buyer schemes.
We also forget that, while Labor’s Kevin Rudd splashed cash around on school halls and $900 cheques for every household, he was doing it to stop the economy from stalling during the Global Financial Crisis. And he was very successful in doing so.
We assumed when Tony Abbott was elected that he would also be a good economic manager – in fact repairing the economy was one of his key election promises in 2013.
But Abbott did no such thing, bringing in a harsh budget in 2014 that was roundly rejected by voters. This budget made it clear Abbott wanted to repair the economy by making the young, the old, the sick and the unemployed pay more while the rich got off scott free.
This was certainly not what we remembered as the Howard way of doing things, even though we knew the bounteous dollars from the mining boom were long gone.
When Turnbull replaced Abbott we again fell back on the assumption that he’d be better a better economic manager. Turnbull was a self-made multi-millionaire and had been a merchant banker, so surely running the country would be a breeze!
But when the new PM started throwing ideas around like increasing the GST or giving the states the power to raise their own income taxes, we started to doubt him too.
So the announcement of a big tax cut for companies during the budget just didn’t cut it when the PM kept insisting during the election that it would magically deliver “jobs and growth”. We just couldn’t see how it would.
Now the PM must take the time to explain how this will happen, and in doing so convince voters that putting more money in the pockets of business owners will grow the economy.
Turnbull promised us when he challenged Tony Abbott that he would provide economic leadership by talking to voters like adults about the economy. It’s time that he started.
Prove they can be trusted
According to the Liberal Party’s campaign strategists, one of the reasons voters deserted the Government on polling day was because we’ve become very cynical about politics and politicians.
And is it any wonder, given the frequency with which they break promises, or pretend they haven’t broken promises, and expect us to believe the bald-faced lies they regularly tell us, particularly about their opponents.
We’re now hearing that “Mediscare” was the biggest lie of the election campaign, but that’s not to say the Turnbull team didn’t have a similarly distant relationship with the truth. The Coalition’s suggestion that hordes of asylum seekers would swamp our shores if Labor was elected was just as big a lie as Labor’s porky on Medicare.
If Malcolm Turnbull wants to reconnect with Australian voters, then he needs to give us good reason to drop our cynicism. Keeping promises and trusting us with the truth will go some way to doing so.
Listen to us
If the first two things the new Turnbull Government must do seem self-evident, the third is even more bleeding obvious.
In order to succeed, the PM and his team must listen to us, the voters.
It won’t be enough to simply talk at voters about the Government repairing the economy, or being trustworthy. Turnbull and his team will need to make a real effort to understand what voters think is important, what we’re concerned about, and what we want for the country.
Only by making a genuine connection with voters will the Coalition Government have a chance of being re-elected in 2019.
